Playground Politics, Vol. 1

Gosh, it didn't take long for this topic to rear its ugly head. For those of you who aren't familiar with playground culture, let me tell you this first off: it's the first competitive sport your children have to play, and at least they have you to help them run interference for them. If they didn't, they'd get crushed in the melee.

The scene: Kenilworth Park, Cleveland Heights. I like it because it's never crowded and they always seems to have fresh woodchips, which is critical when you're dealing with at least one child who isn't a confident walker. The culprits: two moms with one child each (this is another issue for me, one I'll deal with later). One of the kids is a pretty blond girl about 20 months whom my oldest was desperate to befriend. The other was 3 month old boy, bundled up and snoozing in a pram. The moms were my age.

The showdown started when Oldest Child (OC from now on) followed the girl onto the climber and said, Hi. Because this is her thing now, to say Hi and be social. She follows modeled behavior fairly well.

The blond girl starts screaming. SCREAMING. If the mother could have grown wings and flown onto the climber, she would have. She shoves past OC and picks up Blondie and stares accusingly at my kid, who has begun her "It's okay, girly" speech, because she has sisters and knows what it means to have empathy for another child in distress. Blondie's mom calls down to me, in reference to her daughter, "She doesn't like strangers." I responded, "I'm sorry about that. [OC] is eager to try out her friend-making skills." At which point Swaddled Baby's mom pipes up and says, "Well, we're here on a playdate together." She gives me the defiant jaw, and slowly the picture comes into focus. They are In. We are Out. I can't force them to play with my children, but I can let them know that I am thinking I wouldnt want them to anyway. I responded, "Why yes, because gosh, your son is just raring to have a go!" Blondie's mom marches down the climber, grabs her stroller, and she and her cohort move their stuff over by the swings. They don't look our way again.

My child, meanwhile, is still standing on the climber saying, "It's okay, girly" and clearly wondering where her playmate has run off to. I coax her off the climber and get all my kids in the van. There's no point in staying at the playground. We just learned a hard lesson in exclusion. Blondie was upset, certainly, at this bigger child trying to interact with her. But really, Blondie could have been consoled rather quickly and gotten back on the horse. The issue was that we got sized up by these two chippies and apparently didn't make the cut. And they let me know it by physically removing themselves from our space and nonverbally freezing us out.

This kind of behavior is so pervasive with parents (read: moms) in our neighborhood that it's almost boring to talk about it. It's expected. The mom whose kid has been in the only toddler swing in the park for 30 minutes and doesn't require him to take turns. The moms who show up together to a playground, commandeer a climber or the sandbox, and won't let their children even talk with kids who weren't prescreened for the event. The mom who refuses to scold her sassy, ungrateful child for being rude to other kids because she doesn't want to be seen as a controlling mother. These are the same women who cluck about the fact that 70% of children born in the city of Cleveland are born to unwed mothers 18-22 and that those children are set out on a life of poverty and crime. Well, Kettle, this is Pot, and I'm here to tell you that your children may not be poor or criminals, but they are rude and spoiled, and some days I'm hard pressed to decide which is worse.